· This is just absolutely sadistic when scratch starting. First off, I didn’t at all remember how to get out of the lava pool

Yeah, I made the bottom of the pit a slope so you could see which way to go, as It was flat before, and with the drop having been blind the original gave you almost zero hints as to which way was out. But a subtle visual clue don't help much when you've got 1x shields in a pool of lava. I second scripting you to start with 3x shields - maybe throw in a health can at the end of The World is Hollow, too - but not on upping the charger or giving any extra ammo. You're supposed to sneak in, read terminals, and sneak out without mucking up the timeline, not blast every S'pht in sight!

Actually, providing invisibility powerups on these levels would be a nice touch, if that can be reasoned in plausibly.

Good point. A continuous invisibility script would probably be easy to write for those levels if desired, and while it might seem strange to make a level or two without combat, I don’t recall “Silent as the Grave” from TI:TLL being unpopular. It does make sense from a story perspective for the player to avoid butting in.

ETA: I’m currently going through and making a bunch of cosmetic changes to levels. Mostly I’m fixing title case, putting ambient sound objects on platforms so that they sound correct from a distance, and changing the speeds of platforms that jump out to me as excessively slow. Ideally I’d prefer most platforms not to have speeds below 1 WU/sec, and I’d also prefer none of them to take more than two seconds to get from top to bottom, nor for any of the automatic, continuous platforms to take more than eight seconds to cycle entirely. (And eight seconds is still a lot; I may decide it should be even shorter.) I think it can be justified in “The Far Side of Nowhere”/“The Near Side of Everywhere” as those are slow-paced prologue/epilogue levels, but in most other cases I’d avoid it.

I’ll fork the project and submit a pull request when I’m done. I’ll avoid “Flames of Icarus” for now since it’s clear Lia already did a massive modification. I think you could still keep the Icarus theme for the level – just change it to “Flight of Icarus” perhaps. (Which, beyond the mythological reference, is also a pretty cool Iron Maiden song.)

edit 2: There were a colossal number of platforms in “Unwired” that probably should’ve had the “can’t deactivate externally” flag set – if they somehow got deactivated (i.e., player accidentally hit tab twice in a row on a switch), it would probably leave the player unable to finish the mission. I’m fixing that too. I’m now going to be worried about that throughout the rest of the game. It’s possible all the switches that activate such platforms have the “can be destroyed” tag set, but I don’t feel like checking. On the whole, if a platform has the “activates only once” tag set, it should probably also have the “can’t deactivate externally” tag set, unless there’s a specific reason for it not to.

I also removed that trooper I discussed (also in “Unwired”; I think he was on polygon 471) that never actually activated due to the lack of polygons to move in. If someone feels like reconstructing the geometry to make it so he can move, it’d be worth restoring him.

BTW, I haven’t tested any of these changes in-game yet (I certainly will later, but I won’t have time immediately), so if something makes it no longer possible to complete a level, feel free to change it back. I’ll probably just be doing the first chapter for now.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

OK. I thought I just submitted a pull request, but it’s not showing up under Pfhorrest/Eternal; it only seems to be showing up under my own account here. Clearly I messed something up. I definitely didn’t do it optimally; I cloned the project on my HD after I’d made the changes, then copied the changed version over… which Github didn’t like, as it thought every file was changed due to a different “last modified” date. On the plus side, I’m fairly sure I only submitted commits for the files I actually changed – I went through and selected them manually. Let me know if it worked. I’ll test out my gameplay changes in-game later this week, and I’ll probably go through the platforms in the remaining chapters later today as well.

For future reference, Lia (or someone else who uses github more often than I do), what should I have done to make my PR show up under Pfhorrest’s account? (Also, is it possible to download someone else’s PR, and if so, how?)

ETA: I’m in the process of going through maps to add platform sounds & try to fix slow platforms. I’ve noticed some segments in “Unlucky Pfhor Some” that were definitely simplified due to the 1024-polygon limit – particularly the northeast corner of the structure and the eastern wall. Might it be worth restoring those to their state before Infinity’s polygon limit struck? I don’t have the patience to give it a go tonight, but I might at some future date.

Edit 2: As far as I can ascertain, the platform in “Corporation” – both versions – gets messed up because it hits the Pfhor standing on it and reverses direction. It’s only the one closest to the start point that seems to do this. I’m not entirely sure why, because there’s 1 WU between the platform’s maximum height and the ceiling, and none of the other platforms, which have the same height differential, ever appear to have this problem. I also don’t recall this happening in any previous version of Eternal. AFAICT there are a few ways to solve the problem. One would be to raise the ceiling further. Another would be to lower the maximum height – 2.8 WU rather than 3 WU, for instance. A third would be to just make the innermost platform a regular polygon – I don’t see any particular reason that one really needs to be a platform, other than that it looks cool.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Also I don't know how to solve The Man's github difficulties, but I would love to take a look at his modifications if Lia or someone can help him sort that out.

Unfortunately there's no story-plausible way for invisibility (or any other) powerups outside the first two chapters, for the same reason that there's no more fusion ammo after those either. (Well, I guess maybe it could be plausible in the last chapter? Not the third, in any case). I wouldn't object at all to subtly falling through a 3x canister at the start of the level though.

I don't see a need to replace one of the Corporation levels, and I kinda like the idea of exploring the same facility in two different ways in two different timelines anyway. (Heart of Fusion and Roots and Radicals are two different places, both containing Marathon AI cores, so they're not supposed to connect to each other, they just have similar places within them).

Tonight I modified that last texture so that it will definitely work in the square grids it's used in:

Like here:

and here:

I'll have a true hex pattern in the metal grid, which I also planned to have up tonight but I've run out of time.

Can you download a .zip from the link I posted above? If not I’ll just upload to some file host I guess.

Re: invisibility in “S’pht’ia” and follow-ups, I haven’t played that part of the game in years, but couldn’t the plot just be rejiggered so that Leela takes a MacGuffin of some sort from the Pfhor timeline before departing from Lh’owon? The great thing about a time travel plot is that you can take as long as you need before going back to the past, so there isn’t really any reason Marcus and Leela have to depart right after finding out when Hathor goes back to Lh’owon.

I like the two different “Corporation” levels a lot, but I still find myself wanting to play a combined version, too. Maybe there could be some sort of secret level that would combine the two versions for a Vidmaster’s Challenge type thing.

I thought “Heart of Fusion” and “Roots and Radicals” might be intended to be two different locations, but the AI cores themselves are incredibly similar – in fact, are they actually identical? I can’t recall any differences. I almost wonder if they should be distinguished more in the latest version. I can see a reasonable in-universe explanation for why they’d be so similar, but from a gameplay standpoint it’s kinda weird. I also wonder if the cores should be populated with monsters more. IIRC they’re both pretty empty. Is the explanation that the security in that part of the Marathon is good enough that the Pfhor can’t get in? I guess that would make a certain amount of sense.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

The Man wrote:OK. I thought I just submitted a pull request, but it’s not showing up under Pfhorrest/Eternal; it only seems to be showing up under my own account here. Clearly I messed something up. I definitely didn’t do it optimally; I cloned the project on my HD after I’d made the changes, then copied the changed version over… which Github didn’t like, as it thought every file was changed due to a different “last modified” date. On the plus side, I’m fairly sure I only submitted commits for the files I actually changed – I went through and selected them manually. Let me know if it worked. I’ll test out my gameplay changes in-game later this week, and I’ll probably go through the platforms in the remaining chapters later today as well.

For future reference, Lia (or someone else who uses github more often than I do), what should I have done to make my PR show up under Pfhorrest’s account? (Also, is it possible to download someone else’s PR, and if so, how?)

Welcome to GitHub, where a lot of things don't work the way one would expect.

As you've discovered, git doesn't like it when you do something it wasn't told about. If you're going to push from your local machine, you need to 1.) clone - You can't download and then tell git to use that, git needs to do the downloading itself or it gets confused. And then 2.) make your changes, or copy in your changed files.

If you've got a borked directory on your machine, try deleting everything you haven't worked on, delete the hidden .git folder, then clone into a new directory, and then move your changed files over. Then do a

The PR interface is a bit tricky. It never seems to default to where you'd want it to. To propose your changes to Pfhorrest, make sure you've clicked "Compare across forks" (possibly more than once, it can reset on you), that base fork is "Pfhorrest/Eternal," and that head fork is "aaronfreed/Eternal." You will have to click "Create Pull Request" multiple times as it goes through the process before the PR will actually be created.

There. Hopefully that worked. Thanks; Github doesn’t have the world’s most intuitive interface.

Also, too, the new textures look great.

(I’ve started working on getting Basilisk II running, BTW, Lia, but I think it’s too late at night for me to comprehend the instructions. It might have to wait until Sunday, which is the next time I’ll have another day off from work.)

ETA: Now going through “S’pht’ia” and “Flames/Flight of Icarus” since the latest PR has been cleared. I’m having to add far fewer sound objects to these – I guess Lia already had the same idea. Or maybe they were already there in the Bungie levels.

In order to save people time in the future, I should note that if you have the “Is on Platform” tag selected, it doesn’t matter at all which sound you select – Marathon will automatically play the ambient sound associated with the platform regardless of what sound is specified. This is why I used “Water” for literally all of the sound objects I added – it stands out because it’s unlikely to be used as an ambient sound object in most of those levels. IIRC, the Forerunner set is the only one that uses water, apart from occasional exceptions like the revised “Flames of Icarus”. Which I think I’m going to go play as soon as I’m done with my revisions to “S’pht’ia” (I also put in the discussed 3x recharge can).

This also means that if you want an ambient sound other than the platform’s to play, you’ll need to deselect the “is on platform” tag. If you want it to play only when the platform is active, there are a few ways to do it. One is to have media lights that activate and deactivate with the platform, then use the media lights to control the sound. This won’t work if the platform has visible media on it, since it'll change the light of the media. The other option is to have it activate another invisible platform when it activates and deactivate the same platform when it deactivates, then have that platform control the lights. Both of these are kind of a pain, but they’re the only way I know of to do it.

(You can also use the lights on the ceiling if the platform ceiling is landscape textured, but this is probably a fairly small subset of platforms.)

As a side note, it’s really too bad that A1 still has the -32,768 to 32,767 limit for X and Y; it’d be cool to be able to use the entire S’pht Citadel of Antiquity from “The Hard Stuff Rules” rather than just 2/3 of it.

Edit 2: The new “Icarus” looks great but you’ll definitely want to fix the fog script under media. I don’t know how you have those embedded – I’ve always used MML, but it looks like Eternal usually doesn’t have a separate MML file for each level; if it’s an in-engine thing based on the texture set of the level, you’ll want to change the level’s texture set to either sewage or water, though ideally it’d use the fog script of each media, depending which the player was under.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

I’m definitely doing something wrong again, but I think I’m too braindead to figure out what. I don’t see a pull request on the site, though I’m almost certain there should’ve been one; I pulled the origin about 10 minutes ago, but when I attempted to commit, I got some sort of thing saying I don’t have authentication (which I guess makes sense; Eternal isn’t under my account), but my pull request also isn’t showing up on the site. This is what Github’s desktop app looks like:

I’m also not sure that only the files I wanted to upload actually did; it’s entirely possible that some of these shouldn’t have been included. I’m actually completely sure the terminals shouldn’t have been altered. Only the map files from the third chapter should’ve been in this pull request, and at that, I don’t think I changed “The Land in the Sky” at all this time. Github is weird.

Forrest, did you get my pull request? If not, I’ll worry about it in the morning. I need sleep.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

I got your pull request and accepted it, though I still haven't looked at anything yet just because no time ugh why do I have no time. I'm just trusting for now that it's probably all good and relying on the ability to roll back if it turns out not to be. Would anyone else mind downloading the current merge folder from GitHub and playtesting things in the meantime?

I planned to do some metal textures today but something about all the metal for this set needs to be changed somehow and I couldn't figure it out fast enough so instead I did some rocks that were easier:

I saw; thanks. There should’ve been a second set of commits, but they obviously didn’t submit; I was afraid of that. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong. For now I’ll just upload my current map file off-site.

As far as I remember only the third chapter’s maps should’ve changed (and I don’t even think I changed “The Land in the Sky” since I corrected its title case in the previous set of commits). I haven’t extensively play-tested my changes yet, either, though I have tested a few levels; the biggest concern I have is a few platforms in “The Far Side of Nowhere” that I’m not 100% certain are right. I intend to start play-testing in earnest on Sunday; I probably won’t have a ton of time until then.

(I’ve also been trying – thus far unsuccessfully – to vid a few more M2 levels – “My Own Private Thermopylae” and “All Roads Lead to Sol” at the moment; I’ve also been trying to improve my “Fatum iustum stultorum” film, again without success. Soon, I hope.)

ETA: Never mind; I figured out another way to submit a pull request. This might be the only way to do it. Anyway, third chapter submission is in.

Edit 2: I just realised it still is possible to finish the level with the low ceiling; it’s simply required to use a new path. I guess that might be intentional, then; however, it still looks weird to have the ceiling below the floor. That should probably at least be changed. Perhaps one of the tag switches should also open up a platform on the polygon in question, too.

Edit 3: Done. Hopefully there’ll be two PRs now.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

I see the PRs (or, it looks like, one PR plus a later commit to that PR), but it says there are conflicts that can't be resolved and I can't figure out how to resolve them (I don't see anywhere that I can tell it to just accept your version of the files, for example). I don't know why there would be conflicts since I haven't changed anything since merging your last pull request. It says the different files are S'pht'ia and Icarus. Maybe my master branch includes Lia's modifications to those that weren't there yet when you first forked your branch, and that's why it thinks there's a conflict?

I'm not sure what to do here. Maybe close this PR without accepting it, let you somehow sync with the current version of master and then manually merge your latest changes into that, then submit a new merge request?

ETA: I figured out how to merge the differences from master into that pull request branch, then submitted a pull request to myself from that branch back to master, accepted that, and deleted the conflicting PR branch. So I think what I have now in master is all of your changes except to S'phtia and Icarus. So maybe you can merge the changes from master into your branch, manually re-add those modified files, and submit another pull request for just those?

Yeah, I think with more than one person working on binary files Git does not like them.

Hopefully my latest PR will go smoothly. I went to fix the bad ceiling before I realised The Man had done, and wound up making some improvements to the waterfall & adding ambient & random sound while I was at it. Then I fixed the level's fog, and properly renamed everything to "Flight of Icarus."

The Man and I appear to have conflicting sound philosophy. It seems that The Man only uses the "sewage" sound for "sewage" media, and water sound for water media. I prefer to think of the "sewage" sound as a "running water/sewage" sound, and the "water" sound as a "still water/sewage" sound, and thus mix them according to context.

I understand your reasoning there now that you've explained it, but Marathon plays the water sound over water and sewage sound over sewage, so it kind of sounds weird when you move from a water polygon to a land polygon if there isn't a water sound on the water polygon. I think it'd work if you used both sounds on some polygons, though.

I thought the ceiling might've been a mistake, but I quickly grew to like it, apart from the messed up texturing. It forces the player to explore in order to find a new way through the level. I converted it to a door that gets raised after the player places the chip in the northwest part of the level. It could be made prettier, though. I think I'll split up the hallway and move the door there. That'll also make it possible for the trooper on that polygon to move.

I'll try to figure out what's wrong with the pull requests tonight. Github is confusing.

BTW, how does Eternal do fog in most of its levels? I don't even know where the fog scripts are. I usually use a separate MML file for a given level.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Eternal's fogs are defined in TEXT resources 10020 through 10025, which are then called by the marathon-levels MML in TEXT resource 00128.

I haven't checked on how either of you have been doing your fog yet, but if it's possible to make sure that it's done in the same way / using the same fogs as applicable (or changing them if need be, I'm still not clear how fogs above and below media work), that'd be awesome.

Pfhorrest wrote:I haven't checked on how either of you have been doing your fog yet, but if it's possible to make sure that it's done in the same way / using the same fogs as applicable (or changing them if need be, I'm still not clear how fogs above and below media work), that'd be awesome.

I had seen how you did that, so I changed the FoI's entry in 00128.txt to point to the same fog mml as the mountain levels.

I've decided to try something with the media on that level. I'm going to see if it's possible, just for that level, to redefine two other types of media that aren't currently being used in it to look and act like sewage and water, but play the opposite ambient sound, in order to more effectively implement Lia's idea of having the sewage sound represent moving bodies of liquid and the water sound represent still bodies of liquid. I think it's possible to change the definitions for a single level with embedded MML, but I don't know if the scenario's global definitions will override the level's definitions. I'm also not sure if this will confuse other mapmakers who work on the level - I may have to place an annotation on an inaccessible polygon to explain it.

I'm probably overthinking this, but it'll be a useful exercise to help me write MML better, at least. I don't currently understand media fog scripts, either (which is why Chronicles doesn't use them), and hopefully this will help fix that.

Anyway, thanks for the answers. I'll try redoing Dysmentria's fog script to match all the others tonight, too. I've also just found out we won't be working on Saturday, so I'll have more free time sooner than I thought.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Maybe try a halfway approach. I think the glass is a cool idea, but it might work better if it were subtler - more transparent, in other words. I still like both versions, though.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

That’s a fair point. Is Eternal locked into its number of textures? If not, the glass variant might be an interesting alternate version of that texture that could be added. (Which would actually be something like 12 textures, I guess, due to the horizontal/vertical variants and the number of colour schemes.)

Since my intermediate revision of the newly rechristened “Flight of Icarus” obviously isn’t going to make it onto Github now, I’ll post a rather sloppy vid film of it to YouTube as soon as it finishes encoding. The level was mostly a bit easier than I expected, and I could’ve taken a lot more risks. The film also suffered in that I had to stop playing in the middle of it and go to work, so I’d forgotten what parts of the mission I’d already completed by the time I got back home. (No delay in the film; don’t worry - I paused.) Regardless, I think I got it on the second attempt (I died almost immediately on the first one due to not moving fast enough - most of the level is fairly easy, but it might be worth changing the opening Troopers to Fighters, because that is kind of a cheap death).

Apart from that, I may go through chapter four tonight. I’ll also see what I can do about implementing the changes to “Icarus” I mentioned above, though I’m not sure I can figure out that much MML right now, as I’m also exhausted. Watch this space.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

The Man wrote:That’s a fair point. Is Eternal locked into its number of textures?

Pretty much, yeah. There's a scheme to it all that I like.

(Earlier in the year as I was about to start this project I realized that something like the scheme I designed Eternal's textures around could have been done slightly differently and been much more useful and effective. Basically getting rid of the wall lights and logos; then for the rest, have plain-flat, horz and vert detail, floor, ceiling, hall, shaft, and big-wall general texture layouts; have variations on all of those for four sub-environments of each texture set, a clean indoor-upstairs one, an industrial indoor-downstairs one, an outdoor-surface one, and an outdoor-subterranean one; and then four color variants of all of the above, so that by the four-color theorem every adjacent room can look different from the previous one even if it's in the same sub-environment. It would end up being almost exactly the same number of textures overall, and a lot of the existing ons could have been repurposed to that end, but redoing the entire scenario to fit that scheme would have been way more work than I could manage. So it'll have to go on my list of things to go back in time and tell my younger self to do differently, like having a Nahk chapter instead of a Pfhor chapter).

I know there’s a symmetry between all the texture sets, and I wouldn’t even think to change that, but what I’m asking is if there’d be a way to add new textures to all the sets. In other words, you could make alternate versions for two textures in each set, but if you’re already at or approaching a limit in the A1 engine, that would obviously be a pointless exercise.

If the main reason all that would be time-consuming is due to retexturing, there’s an auto-retexturing script in JUICE that seems to work fairly well (JUICE screws up merged maps, but I’ve never had any problems using it for unmerged stuff). Just don’t use it on landscapes. If there are problems with it, I can probably look at the source code when I’ve relearned some of the Java stuff I’ve forgotten.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

Yeah I don't think I want to go changing the texture sets like that unless I was to go whole hog and do it like I described before.

I hoped to get all the metals done tonight but goddamn metals are a pain in the ass and I ran out of time.

I toned down and darkened the glass on these though:

And I did get something done with the metals. The base texture needed to be made much plainer in order to work as a base texture in others and not drown out their unique characteristics. I tried to make up for it by putting its unique shape into its bump map, but I think I overdid it:

And I got the metal grid texture done, though meh I still really don't like it that much:

Both of them are pretty unobtrusive in-game, at least, which I guess is a good thing.

On the other hand, I've been noticing that indoor grid texture can easily look like it's a bunch of pictures hung on the wall, and I'll probably need to do something about that. (In positive news, OMFG those rock textures look fantastic in game).

I hope to finish the metal horiz and vert textures and maybe fix that and other things tomorrow night. Maybe. I had hoped to use that night to check out everything you two have been doing but I probably still won't have any time now. Never enough time :-(

ETA: Github is giving me this error message that I am finding incomprehensible.

error: Pulling is not possible because you have unmerged files.hint: Fix them up in the work tree, and then use 'git add/rm <file>'hint: as appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit.fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.

“Fix them up in the work tree” is frustratingly vague. What does it mean by this? At this point I think it would almost be simpler to just keep uploading files on Zippyshare rather than try to keep figuring out how to resolve all these incomprehensible error messages.

Also I’m not sure that commit I just submitted should be merged; in fact, I didn’t even think it would get submitted. I’ll try to make sense of what the latest revision of each file is, and then submit one that actually is current.

Edit 2: There, I think I fixed everything. I hope. I’m definitely not going into chapter 4 tonight; I think I’m going to bed as soon as I finish encoding these few videos.

Perhaps “Flight of Icarus” should use the same aboveground fog script as “The Land in the Sky” etc. The orange-tinted fog seems more suited for lava levels, which “Flight of Icarus” definitely isn’t now. I’ll worry about that tomorrow, though.

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

The Man wrote:Github is giving me this error message that I am finding incomprehensible.

error: Pulling is not possible because you have unmerged files.hint: Fix them up in the work tree, and then use 'git add/rm <file>'hint: as appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit.fatal: Exiting because of an unresolved conflict.

“Fix them up in the work tree” is frustratingly vague. What does it mean by this? At this point I think it would almost be simpler to just keep uploading files on Zippyshare rather than try to keep figuring out how to resolve all these incomprehensible error messages.

Also I’m not sure that commit I just submitted should be merged; in fact, I didn’t even think it would get submitted. I’ll try to make sense of what the latest revision of each file is, and then submit one that actually is current.

Well, I can see your fork is 12 commits behind Pfhorrest's. At the least you need to update your fork to be in sync with Pfhorrest's and mine. Also, it will be a *lot* easier to make your revisions to my map than it will be to make mine to yours. There are a grand total of 47 different liquids in use now, I don't want to set them all back up!

The Man wrote:Perhaps “Flight of Icarus” should use the same aboveground fog script as “The Land in the Sky” etc. The orange-tinted fog seems more suited for lava levels, which “Flight of Icarus” definitely isn’t now. I’ll worry about that tomorrow, though.

I've already fixed the fog, as you can see in my above screenshot. Again, you need to pull in the changes I sent to Pfhorrest's into your own. Same as the pull requests you've done, only in reverse. Make sure you move your "updated" FoI into a different folder if you need to reference it to revise the latest FoI.